Thursday, July 11, 2013

Behold! A Miracle

Text by Trina
Photos by Trina and Greg

It might be considered more of an actual miracle if my fig tree were to sprout forth a banana or a live piranha, but given this tree's history, the presence of even a single, tiny, pre-pubescent fig is, truly, nothing short of miraculous.

This tree lives in a pot on wheels because I live in Colorado. It gets rolled indoors for the winter. After a painful lesson two summers ago about figs not liking wind, I decided to leave the tree inside for the whole season last year. It didn't like that either. Yes, it was protected from wind, but it simply didn't get enough sun so its growth became very leggy with lots of long, bare branches that sported 3 or 4 big leaves at the tip, and no fruit spurs whatsoever. The tree was taking up the entire living room with its rangy branches and producing no fruit. This spring, wind or no wind, the tree had to go outside. I wheeled it out, gave it a shade cloth for the transitional period, and then pruned it hard, shortening the leggy branches and, in phases, removing all the leafy growth so that the tree would essentially start completely over in a more compact growth habit. I didn't dream that the tree would offer up any fruit after such an assault, so I was pruning in anticipation of a possible crop next year. The tree is now the happiest and healthiest I've seen it since I bought it, and it looks like it might be rewarding me ever so sparingly with a single fig.